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Some household products use enzymes to speed up chemical reactions: enzymes in biological washing powders break down protein, starch or fat stains on clothes, and enzymes in meat tenderizer break down proteins into smaller molecules, making the meat easier to chew.
Biocatalysis refers to the use of living (biological) systems or their parts to speed up chemical reactions. In biocatalytic processes, natural catalysts, such as enzymes , perform chemical transformations on organic compounds .
Enzymes are proteins that speed up chemical reactions necessary for life, in which substrate molecules are converted into products. [1] An enzyme facilitates a specific chemical reaction by binding the substrate to its active site, a specialized area on the enzyme that accelerates the most difficult step of the reaction.
Enzyme catalysis is the increase in the rate of a process by an "enzyme", a biological molecule. Most enzymes are proteins, and most such processes are chemical reactions. Within the enzyme, generally catalysis occurs at a localized site, called the active site.
An enzyme is a substance that acts as a catalyst in living organisms which helps to speed up chemical reactions. [12] Carbonic anhydrase is one important enzyme that is found in red blood cells, gastric mucosa, pancreatic cells, and even renal tubules. It was discovered in the year 1932 and it has been categorized into three general classes. [13]
Almost all metabolic processes in the cell need enzyme catalysis in order to occur at rates fast enough to sustain life. The study of how fast an enzyme can transform a substrate into a product is called enzyme kinetics. The rate of reaction of many chemical reactions shows a linear response as function of the concentration of substrate molecules.
An illustrative example is the effect of catalysts to speed the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen: . 2 H 2 O 2 → 2 H 2 O + O 2. This reaction proceeds because the reaction products are more stable than the starting compound, but this decomposition is so slow that hydrogen peroxide solutions are commercially available.
Diffusion limited perfect enzymes are very rare. Most enzymes catalyse their reactions to a rate that is 1,000-10,000 times slower than this limit. This is due to both the chemical limitations of difficult reactions, and the evolutionary limitations that such high reaction rates do not confer any extra fitness. [1]
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